I am unsure if you’ve seen the movie ‘A Quiet Place’, but if you haven’t, let me give you a quick lowdown. It is an apocalyptic film where the world's end comes in the form of a monster invasion. These creatures are hyper-sensitive to noise; if you stay quiet, you stand a higher chance of surviving. The tension comes from the fact that even a pin drop can be a cause of death. I’ve spoken before about my aversion to noise and my sensitivity to it due to being autistic, but beyond the autism, I believe we all crave quiet. Maybe me a little more than most, but I think we all need to press stop on the world’s jukebox every now and then. The sounds we need to escape from differ from those we plunge into.
I often tell people how appealing the apocalypse sounds because of the silence, but between you and I, complete silence is not the sort of silence I long for. Silence is very rarely silent. There is bird song, tree rustle, rainfall, or some soft little something on the stereo. There are versions of silence that are loud. People find it in the roar of a live show tucked in the chords of a guitar riff or in the surround sound of a movie theatre. Certain words defy their definitions. Silence is one of them.
So I ask, what noise equates silence to you?
I believe silence refers more to the static within us. Sometimes the humdrum of living gets too loud, and it is that we must silence. The week's noise haunts us, and I play some punk music to find a place where everything around me is not screaming apart from the stereo, which is a screaming of my choosing. Quiet is designed by its maker, the maker being you, and a hunt for quiet, more often than not, means you need to get lost in your own sound.
I mention A Quiet Place because, upon watching it, I went through this self-experiment of being hyper-aware of the sounds I make and the sounds that surround me. An experiment doesn’t work unless you are honest, so change nothing about the way you do things, but pay attention to the little tings and clangs and general ruckus of life as you maneuver through it.
How unbothered are you by your own racket?
Yet, how frustrated do you get by the little murmurs of other people? The sound of a distant conversation drives me crazy, and there are multiple instances where the softer, more hollow sounds have more ability to get under my skin. There is so much more to peace than noise. We often envision quiet as still. I think of my Grandmother nestled into the corner of her sitting room, reading some TV magazine as she meticulously planned her week of watching. Then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I can still hear the echoes of my Mother as she converses on the telephone with her. My Mother and Grandmother are like two scientists on the verge of something revolutionary. They speak with that level of urgency. In all of the natural disaster movies, the two characters talk in the treacherous winds, yelling across the centimeters, and my Mother, on any telephone, speaks with the same cadence. I have questioned the purpose of the telephone when it comes to my mother because I am certain if she spoke at the same volume, the person on the other end could still hear her clearly, but this is my mother's silence. My father completes puzzles but also drills holes, and he will find any excuse to rummage around in his toolbox and fix something. The silences we search for aren’t typically silent. They just speak the same language as our heartbeats. If everything feels too loud right now, find a new sound to combat it. The ding of a pinball machine or the sound of paper as you turn the page of a new book. There is no guilt in silence defining itself as you being alone or needing to be the inventor of your own thunder. If you need to close yourself off from the outside world, throw on some jams and throw yourself around the kitchen then get to dancing. Listen to your rhythm and create whatever melody sounds like silence. Peace is a personal preference, and there is no shame in needing it, and most certainly, there is no shame in making it. Be loud, be silent. They are too often two species of the same beast.
What did you think of this week’s newsletter? Please let me know all about your personal silences. Sound off in the comment, and what follows is a bunch of music and sounds if you want to check them out.
I am not suggesting you listen to the entirety of this, but below are two hours of silence recorded in two locations. The first is the bedroom, and the second is the living room. Notice the sounds present. Notice how silence is a myth, and there is a present static.
I recently stumbled upon this playlist called Gloomcore, which is such a silence. Check out the full playlist below.
And lastly here is the punk record that I find silences the static within me. It is loud, and it is beautiful. Here is also a melodic, ambient metal record which is, again, loud but very silent.
I love this. For various reasons, I have sensitive hearing. In a crowded room I can hear 5 or more separate conversations at once. I often hear things off kilter and making strange noises before other signs of the issue comes to light. I very often go days without speaking. And yet, I always have many dialogues running in my mind. I can sit in complete silence if it is natural sounds. Water is my absolute favorite; waves, waterfalls, rain, rivers, a lake. I love them all. I'm learning to love birds too although I can't tell one bird call from another. I can absolutely live without television, but I could not live without music. I love living in a time where I have access to almost any song in an instant. I carry around playlists as security blankets. I have them for every occasion. I can't write without music playing and I have separate playlists for each project. I love listening to the BBC, always a familiar structure with familiar voices and no commercials with limited news interruptions. I also have an extensive vinyl record collection for when the internet stops working. I have started a running catalogue of sounds that create stillness and activation within me. I am learning to use it as a medicine, to surrender to the sounds I know I need.
Oh “The Quiet Place” - unexpectedly terrifying!
I remember friends and a therapist asking if I could (would) just sit in my room for a period of time with no TV, no music, no sound machines - and just be with my thoughts, my immediate answer was “No!” Then I tried it. And my answer was “Nope Nope Nope - not doing this!”
You may have heard the saying
“The silence was deafening.”
Well - it was. Ambient noise combined with the noise of my racing thoughts was a brutal experiment that I rarely practice…even in moments of solitude there is something playing (wave patterns to induce sleep or focus, 50’s cool jazz, soft rock pop hits of the 70’s and 80’s, metal/punk/industrial “noise”, neoclassical drone…)
I have always found hearing (and the mechanisms of) fascinating. Maybe why I went to school for speech language pathology with a focus on Audiology…that is a story for another day - but sound or the absence of it fascinates me.
I know several people who use cochlear implants and I will see them with the device just dangling off their head…when I inquire most say to me “It’s simply TOO MUCH noise” - what I believe they are saying is too much “input” - the brain can only handle and process so much of that at one time before it becomes jumbled up fruit salad of chaos in sound form.
I love these thoughts you pose…
“My favorite sound is sun as it sets”
POWERFUL WORDS!
Before I go - Kauan is amazing!
Discovering new music is a gift 🎁
Thank you for sharing!